June book reviews
Perfect 10: The UGA GymDogs & the Rise of Women's College Gymnastics in America - Suzanne Yoculan (non-fiction, sports, memoir) (*)
Perfect 10 is a classic example of a niche book that has been pitched optimistically at a wider audience. An autobiography of Suzanne Yoculan, the esteemed former women's gymnastics coach at the University of Georgia, the book would make a sensible addition to the university's campus store. Mediocre autobiographies with limited appeal are what self-publishing is made for!
Somewhere along the line, however, someone decided they could shill this book beyond Athens, Georgia. The addition of the byline, The UGA GymDogs & the Rise of Women's College Gymnastics in America gives the book a whole different spin. Unfortunately, this dull, poorly-structured book does not rise to the task of bringing to life the rise of college gymnastics.
Women's college gymnastics is, in fact, a fascinating beast. While most athletes compete in college and then, if they're good enough, advance to the Olympics or the national baseball/football/basketball leagues, women's college gymnastics works inversely. Since their teenage years are their prime gymnastics years, women's college gymnastic competitions are the preserve of athletes who've already reached incredibly high international standards and are now finishing out their careers.
US college women's gymnastics takes a lonely and physically taxing sport performed by teenagers with little-girl bodies and reinvents it as a team sport performed by grown women. And, in a post-Title-IX world, its meteoric rise in popularity and relevance is an interesting subject for discussion.
I mention this because, based on Perfect 10, you'd think college gymnastics was really, really boring.
I tend to think that structure is what separates good non-fiction books from bad ones. With that in mind, this book has one of the worst structures I've ever seen. For example, the chapter on Title IX (which made it illegal to financially favour men's sports over women's sports) is bewilderingly buried at the very end.
The GymDogs' 25-year history is unloaded in a style that can only be described as INFODUMP. There's no attempt to bring to life the team's championship wins and losses. Individual gymnasts are not evoked as living, breathing characters; they're just names on a page. All of this makes it just so hard to care!
What Yoculan's co-author Bill Donalson was doing during the writing of this book, I have no idea. In the acknowledgements, Yoculan thanks him for compiling the scoring stats. Gee, thanks, dude! The book is written in the exhausting style of a non-writer who has no idea how to present events and ideas with flair. Most bizarrely, the author literally copies and pastes long sections of text written by other people -- articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines, additional info given by colleagues and coachees. Do I need to point out that this is just not how you should ever write a book? (A blog post, maybe.)
GOD, THIS BOOK IS REALLY BORING. And, the sad thing is, in the hands of a talented journalist or ghostwriter, it could have been a decent read.
Way Past Cool - Jess Mowry (fiction, teen) (**)
In Way Past Cool, a group of poor black kids in Oakland, California fight to keep their neighbourhood safe from the systemic rot of drug dealers and corrupt cops. Jess Mowry handles the subject with an adept balance of thoughtfulness and grit, but Mowry inescapably feels like a novice writer and, as a result, the milleu ends up poorly-realized.
Cool is filled with compelling characters (teenage single mom Markita, in particular, breaks out of her cliche, feeling warm and fully-formed) and unflinching commentary on society, racism and coming-of-age. Mowry's prose is frequently sharp and engaging, and his inspired use of Malapropisms is the novel's literary highlight.
However, Cool is a tough read -- for reasons that have nothing to do with the brutal subject matter. Mowry scarcely uses summary narrative, instead 'enacting' all the storylines through overlong scenes. Both plot points and moments of poignancy get lost amid mindless chatter between the characters. (It's no exaggeration to say that most scenes literally begin with, "hi, what's up?" and end with "well, I guess I'd better be going... bye.")
Similarly, the action sequences are hard to follow and, thus, frequently unexciting. I literally did not realize that one character had died during a street fight until the next scene when the other characters began memorializing him. Sure, I can be a lazy reader at times, but it's bad writing that brings out that inclination in me.
Cool, in the end, is a novel that I wanted to like, but it was so fraught with narrative messiness that I found I was glad to finish it.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale (non-fiction, history, true crime) (***)
In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale reexamines a murder that took place in a sleepy English village during the 19th century -- a case that captured the popular imagination and inspired a slew of fictional 'country house' murder mysteries.
The resulting book works better as a history of detective fiction than as an account of true crime. The book is so minutely detailed that the pace is on the slow side, and the final reveal about the murderer is a long time coming and shrouded in ambiguity. Also, an unfair criticism, but worth mentioning nonetheless: the Road Hill House murder has been reinvented by fiction authors a thousand times in the past 150 years, making the real tale feel hackneyed.
However, as a snapshot of life in Victorian England, which boasted a brand-new pack of police detectives, such as the eponymous Mr Whicher, it's interesting stuff. Read it for the clearly-presented history, but don't expect to be riveted.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain (non-fiction, memoir) (***)
The first and probably last book I will ever read by Anthony Bourdain -- but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. Bourdain's schtick is well-established by now: he's a bad boy chef, you know! His tales of 14-hour days in the kitchen, buoyed by drugs and alcohol, are frequently illuminating, but often tedious.
Kitchen Confidential is part memoir, part journalism, and veers confusingly between the two, betraying the fact that it was not intended as a book, but slowly eked out as a series of articles. Nontheless, Bourdain writes clearly and concisely about an insular and interesting world.
Perfect 10 is a classic example of a niche book that has been pitched optimistically at a wider audience. An autobiography of Suzanne Yoculan, the esteemed former women's gymnastics coach at the University of Georgia, the book would make a sensible addition to the university's campus store. Mediocre autobiographies with limited appeal are what self-publishing is made for!
Somewhere along the line, however, someone decided they could shill this book beyond Athens, Georgia. The addition of the byline, The UGA GymDogs & the Rise of Women's College Gymnastics in America gives the book a whole different spin. Unfortunately, this dull, poorly-structured book does not rise to the task of bringing to life the rise of college gymnastics.
Women's college gymnastics is, in fact, a fascinating beast. While most athletes compete in college and then, if they're good enough, advance to the Olympics or the national baseball/football/basketball leagues, women's college gymnastics works inversely. Since their teenage years are their prime gymnastics years, women's college gymnastic competitions are the preserve of athletes who've already reached incredibly high international standards and are now finishing out their careers.
US college women's gymnastics takes a lonely and physically taxing sport performed by teenagers with little-girl bodies and reinvents it as a team sport performed by grown women. And, in a post-Title-IX world, its meteoric rise in popularity and relevance is an interesting subject for discussion.
I mention this because, based on Perfect 10, you'd think college gymnastics was really, really boring.
I tend to think that structure is what separates good non-fiction books from bad ones. With that in mind, this book has one of the worst structures I've ever seen. For example, the chapter on Title IX (which made it illegal to financially favour men's sports over women's sports) is bewilderingly buried at the very end.
The GymDogs' 25-year history is unloaded in a style that can only be described as INFODUMP. There's no attempt to bring to life the team's championship wins and losses. Individual gymnasts are not evoked as living, breathing characters; they're just names on a page. All of this makes it just so hard to care!
What Yoculan's co-author Bill Donalson was doing during the writing of this book, I have no idea. In the acknowledgements, Yoculan thanks him for compiling the scoring stats. Gee, thanks, dude! The book is written in the exhausting style of a non-writer who has no idea how to present events and ideas with flair. Most bizarrely, the author literally copies and pastes long sections of text written by other people -- articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines, additional info given by colleagues and coachees. Do I need to point out that this is just not how you should ever write a book? (A blog post, maybe.)
GOD, THIS BOOK IS REALLY BORING. And, the sad thing is, in the hands of a talented journalist or ghostwriter, it could have been a decent read.
Way Past Cool - Jess Mowry (fiction, teen) (**)
In Way Past Cool, a group of poor black kids in Oakland, California fight to keep their neighbourhood safe from the systemic rot of drug dealers and corrupt cops. Jess Mowry handles the subject with an adept balance of thoughtfulness and grit, but Mowry inescapably feels like a novice writer and, as a result, the milleu ends up poorly-realized.
Cool is filled with compelling characters (teenage single mom Markita, in particular, breaks out of her cliche, feeling warm and fully-formed) and unflinching commentary on society, racism and coming-of-age. Mowry's prose is frequently sharp and engaging, and his inspired use of Malapropisms is the novel's literary highlight.
However, Cool is a tough read -- for reasons that have nothing to do with the brutal subject matter. Mowry scarcely uses summary narrative, instead 'enacting' all the storylines through overlong scenes. Both plot points and moments of poignancy get lost amid mindless chatter between the characters. (It's no exaggeration to say that most scenes literally begin with, "hi, what's up?" and end with "well, I guess I'd better be going... bye.")
Similarly, the action sequences are hard to follow and, thus, frequently unexciting. I literally did not realize that one character had died during a street fight until the next scene when the other characters began memorializing him. Sure, I can be a lazy reader at times, but it's bad writing that brings out that inclination in me.
Cool, in the end, is a novel that I wanted to like, but it was so fraught with narrative messiness that I found I was glad to finish it.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale (non-fiction, history, true crime) (***)
In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale reexamines a murder that took place in a sleepy English village during the 19th century -- a case that captured the popular imagination and inspired a slew of fictional 'country house' murder mysteries.
The resulting book works better as a history of detective fiction than as an account of true crime. The book is so minutely detailed that the pace is on the slow side, and the final reveal about the murderer is a long time coming and shrouded in ambiguity. Also, an unfair criticism, but worth mentioning nonetheless: the Road Hill House murder has been reinvented by fiction authors a thousand times in the past 150 years, making the real tale feel hackneyed.
However, as a snapshot of life in Victorian England, which boasted a brand-new pack of police detectives, such as the eponymous Mr Whicher, it's interesting stuff. Read it for the clearly-presented history, but don't expect to be riveted.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain (non-fiction, memoir) (***)
The first and probably last book I will ever read by Anthony Bourdain -- but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. Bourdain's schtick is well-established by now: he's a bad boy chef, you know! His tales of 14-hour days in the kitchen, buoyed by drugs and alcohol, are frequently illuminating, but often tedious.
Kitchen Confidential is part memoir, part journalism, and veers confusingly between the two, betraying the fact that it was not intended as a book, but slowly eked out as a series of articles. Nontheless, Bourdain writes clearly and concisely about an insular and interesting world.